Archive for the ‘IdeaStream’ Category

At Dub, we help our global clients (brands and agencies) create private, invite-only online communities for the purpose of delivering game-changing insights, collaborative innovation and co-creation. This means helping bring together a brand and its customers, but also those who aren't yet consuming their products or services, or those that actively don't want to. These are often referred to as outliers or abstainers, and they are the people who can deliver the best ideas and the richest insights.

The insight communities we help create can be categorised as either Project-based or Longitudinal.

1. Project-based Insight Communities

As the name suggests, these communities are short-lived; typically a couple of days up to a a few weeks. They are tasked to meet a single project objective (research, insight or co-creation) and once this has been achieved, they are quickly disbanded.

Being focused on a single objective means that activity is over a shorter period but is likely to be intensive. Members of the community are likely be assigned exercises on a daily basis, and these can range from blogging, keeping diaries, roleplaying, group discussions, surveys and polls, and brainstorms. Unlike traditional research techniques, members have a much clearer idea as to what is happening with the information and ideas they share since the asynchronous nature of the engagement affords the Community Manager / Moderator the time to feedback. This in itself motivates participation.

In support of project-based insight communities, Dub has the leading platform called IdeaStream

2. Longitudinal Insight Communities

Brands like the opportunity longitudinal insight communities afford, since it's like getting a large number of their most valued customers together in a room and making them available to answer any questions anyone in the organisation has at any time, 24/7.

Because of the longer-term nature of these communities, different tactics and resources need to be deployed to keep them alive and active. This includes going behind just the task-based level of interaction seen in the project-based communities, and allowing members to go off-piste and start their own discussions. The community (and insight) will also benefit from letting members strike-up their own relationships, as it allows the brand to witness their customers talking about their products and services in the most natural, unfacilitated fashion.

To help you deliver successful longitudinal insight communities, Dub has developed the UpClose platform.

In addition to providing the best technology, Dub has a wealth of experience in how to find the right people for your community, how to engage and optimise your time with them, and how to ensure your members are motivated and rewarded over time. Dub can help you plan how long your community should be and give you guidance on how to deliver design effective online research.

To find out more about how Dub can help you fire-up your insight communities, make better decisions and be more innovative, contact stephen@dubstudios.com

With Spring in the air and an extra special Royal Wedding Bank Holiday to enjoy (for those lucky devils in our London office!), not to mention the Easter Bank Holidays, we wanted to let you know that it’s business as usual at Dub Towers. Our team will be on hand around the clock over this period to help you with your online research projects and communities.

For help and support from our UK team, contact Tom Watts on +44 (0) 20 7247 3327 or emailtom@dubstudios.com

If you’re located in the US or nearby, contact Kerry Hecht on +1 310 997 5779 or email kerry@dubstudios.com

A right Royal offer!

To mark the special Royal occasion, we’re offering our clients the chance to order projects during the week commencing 25th April 2011 and get a discounted initial week at £300, that’s a massive 50% discount.

Hurry, this offer ends on 28th April 2011, when we must have received confirmation.

We were very pleased with ourselves and feeling proud when we received this testimonial from one of our Australian clients in our inbox today. I think you'll see why when you read it...

It’s a combination of simplicity and sophistication that makes IdeaStream from Dub one of the best market research software packages that we’ve used.

Simplicity is for the participants – the ease of registration, the ability to customise the design of the platform and the user friendly interface means it’s easy to quickly establish a relationship with the people you need to engage with and ensure they are comfortable with your objectives and needs.

The sophistication is the back end and the research expertise that has so clearly gone into the design of the product.  From project management to reporting, IdeaStream allows researchers and their clients to have access to a powerful live platform.

Our company has evaluated and used competitor offerings and IdeaStream is by far, superior in all aspects.

If you'd like to find out what makes online qual tick and have the same experience as our friends around the world, contact Stephen Cribbett on +44 (0) 20 7247 3327 or email us@dubstudios.com

Whether you are new to the world of online qual and collaborative innovation or not, you might  be tasked with creating company or department-wide adoption of your new software. The range of  social software available to you, including our own IdeaStream online qual solution of course, can drive productivity and efficiency in terms of delivering qualitative research. What's more, exposure to the range of features available is key if the opportunity is to be optimised within the organisation.

Software can fail because it doesn't get adopted by a wider group of users, so it's imperative that, if you've had a positive experience, you share your experience with others and help them repeat your success. IdeaStream has a good range of capabilities and features designed by researchers for researchers. By working with Dub to create a roll-out plan, you will witness greater, faster adoption across your business, which in turn will experience greater research success, a more innovative approach and a burgeoning pipeline.

Here are just few pointers that you may wish to follow in order to generate greater adoption among your colleagues, but for more information, contact Stephen Cribbett on +44 (0) 20 7247 3327

#1 Assign 'Champions'

Successful roll-out of your new new software, be it IdeaStream or any other, is best drive by a core group of energetic and well-connected individual 'champions'. What typifies a champion is their ability to communicate with passion, their connectivity within the organisation and their early-adopter status. Champions spot the underlying benefits early on and discover ways to articulate these to the group. They are proponents of social software and heavy users of social media and online networks for their own personal purposes.

Dub has a range of materials to support the whorl of champions and aid the roll-out, including training videos and written documents, webinars and presentations.

#2 Get hands-on

Key to adoption is the first step of getting your colleagues to 'try it' and get hands-on. To enable this, the 'whats in it for me' question is always an important one to answer, so why not consider creating an internal project which may glean insight that helps them with a current project or challenge. Internal communities are a very valid and powerful way to deliver fresh insight and new perspectives, so don't take them lightly. They can be created in a very short time given the strong connectivity that already exists among the group, not to mention the shared interest in using the new tool and delivering fresh insight around the chosen topic.

To make initial introductions to the software, encourage your colleagues to come to an initial presentation with their laptops. Get them to sign up to your trial project and  kick start involvement there and then. Get them to complete their profile and take in a single, simple task. This will help them witness first-hand how easy the software is to use and how natural it feels to them to add content in a way they are familiar with from their own personal use of social networks.

#3 Build an internal research and innovation community

Following on from #2, after you have completed your introductory session with you colleagues involvement, continue the 'conversations' by running the project over a number of days. Beware not to overplay the trial - you don't want to overload your colleagues. Try and restrict it to no more than 4 or 5 tasks that last approximately 3 days.

Build a range of tasks using the full suite of tools so that your colleagues can experience what their participants may experience in the future. The at the end of the project, present them the Admin Centre and explain how easy it was to moderate the discussions. At this stage it may be pertinent to give your colleagues access to the Admin Centre so that they themselves can experience its feature set.

#4 Build a bank of support documents and training videos

Dub has a range of documents, presentations and webinars for you to access as you plan for adoption, but there's no reason why you can't create your own. These should be deposited in a central location, perhaps your intranet or via a wiki such as Google Docs (which allow document sharing and editing among a group via a web interface).

To get advice on how to plan your roll-out and adoption, contact Stephen Cribbett.

This post continues our series on how the tools offered by our online research community platform, IdeaStream, combined with engaging research methodologies delivers more creative online research. In this article, I'm going to focus on IdeaStream’s Discussion Group tool which is used to support Bulletin Board Focus Groups.

Overview

Discussion Groups are inherently social. They are akin to web-based forums that most of us have had some form of involvement and interaction with. They are focused on delivering insightful ‘conversations’, both between moderators and participants, and among participants in an unforced, more natural way.

When and Where

At the end of last year, we detailed IdeaStream’s powerful blog tool. We explained that research blogs are owned and managed by the participant during the course of the study. Discussion Groups differ in that the Researcher (Community Manager or Moderator) hosts and manages the discussion, with participants invited to take part. As such, the Discussion Group tool is best used when you want to capture collective expression and opinions from participants. They can also be used when you want to observe conversations taking place between participants without prompting - a form of conversation that is often the richest and most natural, and thus the most insightful.

Typically, Discussion Groups require less involvement from participants than tasks designed using the blog tool, and are usually text-based (though there is the option to add multimedia in IdeaStream). This means researchers can publish more discussions within the same period, thus covering more topics.

Discussion Groups have a variety of uses. Here are a few examples:

1. Hints & Tips

The idea is simple - create a Discussion Groups whereby participants are asked to share hints and tips on a specific life experience or subject, with an active encouragement to gain advice from others and provide help and assistance to others.

The approach offers participants insights into others experiences. The Discussion Group will engender exciting new relationships among participants that can subsequently be built on in subsequent tasks. ‘Hints & Tips’ discussions can ne allowed to run and run, and gain momentum from various participants enthusiasm and passion for helping others.

Hints & Tips tasks play on personal knowledge and the desire to share. As such, they are great at igniting relationships and strengthening ties among your community. With this in mind, we recommend launching this type of task nearer the start of a community.

2. Get it off your chest

Using the Discussion Group tool, participants are asked to share something that irritates, frustrates or angers them (in connection with the area of investigation) with the group. It then asks them to suggest how they themselves would resolve the issue. This methodology works in the following ways:

• It harnesses the participants negative energy and channels it into a pro-active thinking and problem solving exercise.
• Participants can see the thoughts and resolutions of others - allowing them to collectively build solutions
• By sharing their experiences with others in the community, participants experience a catharsis, enabling them to move on to future tasks and concentrate on the positive aspects of the area of investigation

3. Debate this

This idea behind this task is to pose a potentially contentious issue and get participants who are likely to posses different viewpoints to discuss it. As you would expect in a real world setting, when differing views are aired, string thoughts, feelings and opinions can emerge. In effect, it allows researchers to observe where the ‘flash points’ of a given area of investigation are.

Key features of Discussion Groups

Here are some of the main features available within Discussion Group tasks, all of which have been developed with a focus on gathering 'quality' research content from participants:

Biased / un-biased discussions
When building your task using the Discussion Group tool, you have the option to create a ‘biased’ or ‘un-biased’ discussion. Biased discussions allow the participants to see what others have posted before they submit their own post. Un-biased discussions result in the participant having to submit their response before they can enjoy what others have said.

Unbiased discussions are used more-often as it’s been proven that participants are more likely to mirror what others have said on presentation of the conversation.

Auto-prompting
A feature available across all of IdeaStream’s asynchronous tools, auto-prompt sends out alerts to participants that have not responded to the task after a pre-defined period of time.

Social settings
Again, common to all IdeaStream tools, when the Community Manager builds the task they have the option to select its social settings. Social settings controls who within the community can see the content generated by that task, and subsequently who they can interact with as they debate the issue.

Picture upload
Participants can posts images to a Discussion Group at any time. This creates more colourful, richer response.

Emoticons
Emoticons, used within forums for many years, allow participants to express their feelings using a range of characteristic faces and icons. This tool is particularly useful in Asian territories where emoticons are used extensively in web-based communication.

Dub has recently completed a great project with one of the UK's leading brand innovation agency clients, on behalf of a major own label ready meal producer.

Objectives
To explore consumer attitudes towards different ready meal cuisine types offered by one of the UK's leading supermarkets. The purpose of this online research community was to evaluate perceptions of several newer cuisines that had recently been introduced within the stores, understand how they impacted on more established cuisine offerings, and to identify any further opportunities/gaps.

Results
The extended nature of the online research community approach meant that we were able to dedicate discussion streams to fully explore consumer responses to a wide range of issues, and to respond/react to comments and insights.

A potential new range opportunity that only emerged in the final couple of days of the online research community is now being actively pursued by our client and is likely to lead to significant incremental business with a major retailer.

For more information contact Stephen Cribbett on +44 (0) 20 7247 3327 or by emailing stephen@dubstudios.com

Courtesy of our client, we've got another great case study to share with you. This time the study was for a salad dressing manufacturer and brand owner, to help them understand current consumer attitudes and dynamics within the sector.

Approach
The study was undertaken over a two week period in the summer of 2010 to coincide with the peak usage of salad dressings, thus enabling 'real-time' experiences to be conveyed. The ongoing nature of the online research community enabled continued probing and interrogation of consumer responses, as well as the introduction of positioning stimulus that helped our agency client to identify the most credible and appealing proposition for our client's brand.

Client comment
"This simply would not have been achievable within the more limited time constraints of a more traditional research methodology (ie; focus group discussions)", say no more!

For more information or to understand how your brand or organisation can benefit from online research communities, contact Stephen Cribbett on +44 (0) 20 7247 3327

Hurry, hurry, hurry!

To thank everyone for their continued support during 2010, we're offering a special 10% discount on new projects commissioned between today, 9th December 2010, and 23rd December 2010 (conditions apply). What's more, if you're a UK client then you also get to avoid the VAT hike! So if you're sitting on a new online qual study or are thinking of building an online research community, why not get in contact now christmasoffer@dubstudios.com or call us on +44 (0) 20 72473327 quoting the reference CHR10.

Conditions
-This offer applies to projects quoted for and commissioned on or after 9th December 2010 only
-The offer comprises 10% discount off the price of your first month's IdeaStream software license only, and not supporting services or consultancy
-This offer closes at midnight (GMT) on 23rd December 2010

Clients can be strange creatures at the best of times, not least when they ask for login details to see what’s going on in real-time within their online research community or bulletin board, but then never actually turn up! We’ve been asking the question ‘why is this happening?’, and have come up with some answers that may help overcome the apparent lack of engagement.

We believe that clients fail to logon as often as hoped for, for one of the following reasons:

1. They are incredibly time-poor
2. It’s not high on their priority list
3. They are asking for login details simply to tick a box, but never intend to logon in the first place
4. They are afraid of the technology and don’t get the right training and support
5. There’s so much data for them to observe and interact with that is scares them off

At Dub, we believe that online qual can deliver a new level of client engagement with the research if handled correctly. We’ve made steps towards supporting this, and have developed a new product that, when deployed alongside other techniques, will get them more engaged and, in turn, more insightful.

To begin with, here are some top tips - things you can do to get them more engaged:

1. Brief them thoroughly on the approach you are taking, the nature of the study design, and what the output will look like.
2. Schedule time to involve them in training on how to use the software, as without it they’ll feel alienated and afraid (your software vendor should be able to provide this support)
3. Keep the client training light - they don’t need to know how to do everything, just to observe and review the output
4. Send them regular digest reports - by email, telephone or whatever the most appropriate method - and include the most colourful, rich conversations and discussions posted
5. Give clients the opportunity to co-design a task or two towards the end of the project, thus  retaining their level of engagement throughout the project

Dissecting the points highlighted above, you’ll spot the need for some smart tools (technology / social software) to help deliver some of these methods. At voila, Dub has derived a number of new tools that can provide the client with a curated view of the latest and the most valuable conversations taking place. Despite not yet having a name (please feel free to make suggestions), the product provides an easily navigable web-based interface that removes many of the controls required to ‘run’ the project on IdeaStream (our online qual software). This clearly makes the interface more efficient and easier for the client to use. It can be customised and also allows the client to enter into conversation with the researcher via a commenting tool as well as being able to quickly share content with colleagues. Content presented to the client is easily curated by the researcher via IdeaStream.

A second new web-based product that Dub are developing is a Project Insight Management & Collaboration platform that allows the research project team (clients, researchers and other stakeholders) to seamlessly share information, collaborate and build ideas online, without the need to be ‘in the room’ or ‘on the phone’. It will run independently of IdeaStream, and will be licensed on a project-by-project basis. If you’re interested to learn more about either of these products, please contact Stephen Cribbett.

Stephen Cribbett
stephen@dubstudios.com
+44 (0) 20 7247 3327 /
m. +44 (0) 7973 663867

We've been very busy here at Dub,  enhancing the latest version of IdeaStream, our online qual research and digital innovation platform. Built by researchers for researchers, IdeaStream is the result of several years combined research, learnings and technical experience, not to mention the invaluable feedback we receive from our clients. These factors have allowed us to build the most powerful and flexible products on the market, and one that we're incredibly proud of.

The latest version of IdeaStream brings with it a suite of useful developments that no only extend its technical capability, but also the range of methodologies it supports. Over the next few weeks, we are going to share more information about these tools and methodologies with you, and give you a closer look at what makes our work so successful. We'll kick-off this week with a closer inspection of IdeaStream's blog tool, followed shortly by a look at the brainstorm, group discussion, live and quantitative tools IdeaStream has to offer.

OVERVIEW
IdeaStream's blog tool takes inspiration from the behaviours that have been forged over the last 10 years of so by blogging platforms the likes of Blogger and WordPress. Most importantly, a task built using the blog tool is inherently personal. Each person assigned a blog task is effectively being given their own blog. For example, if you are running a project and assign 10 participants the same blog task, you are in effect creating 10 unique blogs - 1 for each person, all controllable from a single administrative dashboard. This differs from, say, IdeaStream's Group Discussion tool, whereby a single 'discussion' that is created is effectively published for all (invited) participants to contribute to.

WHEN AND WHERE
IdeaStream's blog tool is best used when you want to capture personal thoughts, expressions and opinions, or if you want participants to immerse yourselves with the the consumer and have them share  their lives, rituals or habits in detail, using multimedia. Blog tasks can be run for just a few days, requiring only a few posts, or as on-going diaries and journals where participants are required to provide input regularly over time. These can last for weeks or even months.

The multimedia upload capability of IdeaStream's blogging tool means you can offer your participants a wide range of methods to express themselves (within the confines of your area of investigation of course). This can be great for idea generation tasks where participants can use the upload tools to bring their thoughts and opinions to life.

Journals and Diaries
We've already written about the benefits of Digital Diaries as an Online Qual Methodology, but it's worth spending more time extolling the virtues of this immersive and longitudinal study technique that harnesses IdeaStream's blog tool perfectly. Diaries and journals are very personal expressions and accounts, and both benefit from the ability to share text, film and pictures to gain a richer illustration of the participant's life experiences. What's more, as a pre-task, using IdeaStream makes for a much more efficient process in terms of the setup process and administering the exercise to participants. We've all experienced the pain of writing paper diaries, couriering them out to people all over the country (or world), only to have the client change their mind on a whim resulting in the need to repeat the process over again. Doing this digitally means that you can quickly and easily make last-minute changes, as well as allowing you to add new micro-tasks at any time over the course of the exercise.

KEY FEATURES
IdeaStream's blog tool carries a range of features that help researchers deliver the most effective and targeted tasks that achieve the highest possible participation rates. These include the following:

Multimedia tasks
When creating tasks in IdeaStream, Community Managers (Moderators) can upload multimedia in support of the exercise or activity. This can serve two purposes; to visually communicate the thrust of the exercise or two share stimulus that respondents are to review and respond to. In the case of the former, an exceptionally successful technique is have the Community Manager film themselves setting the activity or exercise using the integrated webcam feature. This humanises the task, giving it real character and personality. It also engenders a level of empathy that text-only tasks sometimes fail to do. In turn using this technique increases the level of participation and the quality of posting, and also encourages participants to use their webcams to respond - a rich and very engaging response method.

Social settings
As with all IdeaStream tools, when the Community Manager creates a blog task, they have the option to select a unique social settings for that task. Social settings controls who within the participant community can see content generated by other members, and who they can interact with as they discuss and debate what others have said. The settings available are as follows:

• Social - Output from tasks with this setting can be seen by everyone within the community
• Social within Segment -  Output from tasks with this setting can only be seen by people within the same segment
• Private - Output from tasks with this setting can only be seen by the post author.

So for example, if a blog task is set to 'social', then participants assigned that task will be able to see the content generated by all other participants. The 'Private' setting does the opposite and results in participants only seeing content they themselves have posted.  These vital controls offered by IdeaStream allow researchers to approach areas of investigation in different ways. For example, when discussing subjects of a sensitive or very personal nature,using the 'Private' setting reassures the participant that their responses will be viewed in the strictest of confidence.

Multimedia upload
Like other blogging platforms, IdeaStream's blog tool lets participants post text, pictures and rich video. They can easily embed video from third-party websites like YouTube and Vimeo, as well as recording film using their webcam and uploading fill shot on mobile phones or video cameras. By providing this range of options, IdeaStream opens up an exciting range of methodologies for researchers and innovation experts. For example, the webcam can be used to conduct at-home interviews and thus immerse oneself in the life of the consumer. Another successful technique is to prepare interview sheets (as PDF downloads), and have participants print them off then run through the questions whilst filming themselves using their webcam. Even better, they work with a friend or family member who can interview them.

Probing (private/public)
Essential to online cal research is the ability to probe and interrogate participant's responses. In the digital world, this activity is often referred to as 'commenting'. By default, comments are posed in public, meaning all other participants can see comments administered by Community Managers. IdeaStream also offers the ability for Community Managers to administer 'private' comments, that are only visible to the individual participant. This feature supports the notion that researchers often want to probe with deep, sensitive questions during the course of a study.

Auto-prompting
To help make the life of the researcher and Community Manager easy and more efficient, IdeaStream includes an auto-prompting feature. When the researcher of Community Manager sets up their blog task, they have the ability to activate 'auto-prompts' should the participant fail to respond to the task over a set period of time. If and when participants fail to respond, they receive polite notice and links to the task via their email inbox.